How to Make Change ~Nico Bowden

The goal of any philanthropic adventure is to have some sort of impact on our community. As 9th graders at Fenn, we are empowered to do this. Students in Action was but a way to give us the motivation and means to make our own impact. There is nothing to learn about having an impact on a community, so the only way to improve is to learn about how to have an impact on our community. In this respect, we have learned more than we really need to know. We had meetings where we discussed how to ask for donations, we had ways to figure out what we could do that could truly make a difference, and through all this developed a good idea as to what we needed to do. A time when this really showed was when we were considering what we would do, and we came up with an idea to spend time with inner-city kids and hang out with them once a week. We figured that doing this would make a larger difference than anything else we could do with what we had, and although we did not end up doing this for a few reasons, it shows how we perceived the task ahead of us. Being part of Student in Action this year, in all honesty, has not taught me as much as I thought it would, but it still has made a difference.